6 October 2011

Choke on cinnamon buns?

I wrote in a previous blog post about that I get upset about bad programming. I stumbled upon a prime example of bad programming from the excellent website Jävla skitsystem on that it was not possible to buy 20 identical cinnamon buns at 7-eleven at the same time because it crashes the cashier system and it would take 15 minutes to reboot.

I don't know what is most stupid? That there is an actual limit on the amount of goods you can buy, that the system crashes without recovery if you pass this limit or the fact that it takes 15 minutes (!) to reboot. First I cannot understand that the programmer was so narrow-minded he/she could not imagine these situations. Second I don't understand that the company delivering the system did not catch this in their testing. What kind of procedures do they have? And this system handles money...

2 comments:

Declan Lopez said...

Hello,
I came across your site and found that your site is a very good one.
It provide lot of information which will be very helpful for us.
Keep on working on it.

Ulf Eliasson said...

Had a similar story when we wanted to use the self check-in machines at an airport in Italy.

Because my sisters at the time lived in London we had different bookings but with the same last name, Eliasson.

We checked-in the first booking, and everything worked, than when we tried to do the second one it crashed, and it did not start again. So we had to go to the regular check-in, and they said that it is a problem when you have two bookings under the same name on the same flight, the self check-in machines can't handle it so they crash.